


Iacta Alea Est

by Allecto



Series: Satis et Super [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 10:05:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2020950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allecto/pseuds/Allecto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luna learned to draw when she was very little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iacta Alea Est

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't AU when I wrote it, but is now; don't really care.
> 
> Marked as Teen and Up for the seriously depressing back story, which I felt inappropriate for youngsters.
> 
> Iacta Alea Est translates to the die has been cast; it's what Julius Caesar supposedly said before crossing the Rubicon to march on Rome.
> 
> Satis et Super translates to enough and more than enough.

Luna learned to draw when she was very little. Her mother taught her, because her father had always preferred photographs as a method of documenting findings. Her mother had responded that photographs couldn't be your friend, or watch over you. Three years later, when Luna was eight, a finger-paint she'd done of her mother before the cancer started talking to her.

She learned early on that death doesn't have to take loved ones away.

When they first arrive in the common room, after their Sorting, Luna makes quick sketches of her Ravens. They'll be fleshed out later, when she knows them better, their personalities, their quirks, but if nothing else there will be a smudged pencil or charcoal sheet inserted in her Book.

Her mother was the first person in the Book, a smaller copy of the portrait over her bed, redone in watercolor (all her memories of her mother are like that, now, faded and blurry and tinged very slightly in the green that spilled everywhere), but she was not alone long. When Percy went to Hogwarts, Ginny cried for days, and though the fine ink drawing went to her, Luna made a colored pencil sketch as well. Percy liked her mother, liked the attention he got, and for a long time his sharp pencil head lay in her mother's lap, petted gently by watery fingers. When the twins showed up in pastels, Percy went back to his own page. Luna added his pet rat to keep him company.

The faces kept coming after Luna started Hogwarts, as well. Her daddy, because she missed him terribly, embraced her mum with charcoal-gray arms. Ginny, because Luna rarely saw her anymore, but *not* the diary that gave her a funny feeling. Later, Harry was added, Hermione, and Ron. Neville Longbottom. Her teachers, some of them from memory after the fact--she learned quickly not to draw the heads first, or they'd critique her skills while she filled in their bodies.

She copied some of them, made big portraits for the walls of Hogwarts. The Headmaster was done professionally, of course, but Professor McGonagall was never offically promoted. When she gave Severus the small, oily likeness, he went completely still.

"The dementors—"

"I know," she said.

She never told him, but sometimes if she opened the Book too quickly, she'd find her sketch of him (done from memory after they dragged him off to Azkaban) kneeling by McGonagall, strong white fingers carding through his hair like her own mother did once with Percy. She always closed the Book on those occasions, or flipped to another page.

After visiting Remus' pensieve, she painted an acrylic of Sirius, James, and Lily, and another of the Marauders when young, before Peter Pettigrew turned to darkness. She had to spell the Book so they couldn't bother Severus, but copies of the portraits are in there, just the same.

Cedric Diggory's in there, teaching some of the younger portraits how to fly, along with Zacharias.

All her colleagues are there now, and all her students, and little Charlotte Lupin and her parents, who rarely stay on their page but visit everyone especially Harry's parents and Sirius Black.

When the new third years arrive each fall at their first Divination lesson, Luna takes her Book out and shows them the pages, the smiling faces and chattering friends, Harry and Hermione and Ron and the whole Weasley clan, with Draco, and the Lupins and Potters and Sirius, and then she hands out teacups.

"The future can be anything you make it," she tells them. "What do you see in yours?"


End file.
